Tesla Had Fatal Crash Recording, but Only Disclosed It After a Third-Party Hacker Recovered a Copy From the Car ⇥ washingtonpost.com

Earlier this month, Tesla was penalized by a jury when a car’s supervised autonomous vehicle features failed, leading to a collision. When I linked to the CBS News article about the story, this was one of several paragraphs that stood out to me:

The most important piece of evidence in the trial, according to the plaintiffs’ lawyers, was an augmented video of the crash that included data from the Autopilot computer. Tesla previously claimed the video was deleted, but a forensic data expert was able to recover it.

Now, thanks to Trisha Thadani and Faiz Siddiqui, of the Washington Post, we know more about what happened behind the scenes:

Years after a Tesla driver using Autopilot plowed into a young Florida couple in 2019, crucial electronic data detailing how the fatal wreck unfolded was missing. The information was key for a wrongful death case the survivor and the victim’s family were building against Tesla, but the company said it didn’t have the data.

Then a self-described hacker, enlisted by the plaintiffs to decode the contents of a chip they recovered from the vehicle, found it while sipping a Venti-size hot chocolate at a South Florida Starbucks. Tesla later said in court that it had the data on its own servers all along.

One supposed benefit of autonomous vehicle technologies is in public safety. That is how the simple features on my car are described and marketed, at least, the most basic of which is front-facing collision detection and automatic braking. Tesla’s system, among the most advanced on any car, failed in this case with tragic consequences. I am not saying my car would have performed any better. But I would view Tesla’s system differently if it began from a base of reliable safety features rather than the implications of a name like “Autopilot”.

One supposed benefit of ever greater data collection — even having several cameras constantly recording — is that we can better understand a collision. However, that only works as well as an automaker is trustworthy. It is hard to know what to make of Tesla’s defence here. Either it did not look very hard — which is bad — or the company actively avoided producing evidence until it became impossible for it to play dumb. I sure hope it is more compliant in future collision investigations. But I have no trust that it will be.

I worry that Tesla will learn the wrong lesson, and will instead be even more evasive. The media strategy at Elon Musk’s companies these days, including for articles about this crash, is to say nothing. Better for them to be silent when trust in media and institutions is perilously low. Not good for anyone else.